CRS Board letter to City Council

On March 27, 2023, the Board of Trustees of the Cincinnati Retirement system sent a letter to the Mayor and Councilmembers of Cincinnati. This letter is an update to the Board’s letter of January 17, 2023, in which the Trustees recommended increased funding for the pension trust in order to meet the CSA goal of a fully funded pension plan by 2045. You can find a link to this document below.

The city’s professional actuary recently completed an experience study looking at the past five years. An experience study compares what the actuary assumed would happen with what actually did happen. The assumptions include demographics like retirement rates, termination rates, disability rates, mortality rates, salary rates, and family composition.

The study showed that, using the revised assumptions, the actuarial liability (simply put, this is the amount of money needed to pay all the pension benefits that are due now and all the pension benefits that will be due in the future) is 1.4% higher than it was using the previous assumptions. 

The attached letter from the CRS Board reiterates the recommendation of the January letter that the city budget for increases in the pension contribution in increments of 1.5% of payroll, and extends the number of years for increases, from 2036 to 2042. If the city follows this recommendation, the actuary projects our pension plan will be 100% funded in 2045 when the federal court approved Collaborative Settlement Agreement ends. The CRS Board also recommends that the multi-year incremental funding increase methodology be updated annually to assure that full funding is achieved by 2045.

View the letter here: https://cmera.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Board-letter-re-City-Employer-contribution-updated.pdf

Feel free to pass this information on to other retirees and/or active employees.